Image and video forensics.

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Monthly Archives: June 2011

I find myself analyzing new surveillance videos almost every day, and in most of the cases I can either solve the problem very quickly or understand (even more quickly) that there is no information to recover in the video.
In special cases, where something very specific and strange happened; or the problem is very complex it can take a lot of time.

As always… Pareto principle: you solve 80% of the cases in 20% of the time, and, well, 20% of the cases takes 80% of the time.

In my own work probably the right numbers are 95% to 5%, but the idea holds.

With my experience on several thousands cases, I can estimate whether an image or video contains some information and it’s worth processing, or not, very quickly. I usually do a couple of tests, just to be sure of my first glance and sometimes I get surprised by the power of the algorithms; anyway, usually you can tell quite fast if you will get something from a video. Continue reading →

Today, June 14th, is the Italian Innovation day. This afternoon, at about 6 pm, Amped CEO Martino Jerian will meet the Italian President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano in a web conference. He has been chosen as one of the two entrepreneurs that will represent AREA Science Park, the scientific and technological campus where our headquarter is located. Thanks for this great opportunity.

In this post I’ll briefly explain the main idea that is behind Amped Five and how it will improve your work as a forensic video analyst.

Every time we show Amped Five to a person who is not exactly an expert on video analysis, but who has a keen interest, or works with video evidence (such a general law enforcement inspector or detective) he’s impressed with the samples and how effective Amped Five filters are. But, actually, what makes us even more proud is when real experts appreciate our work. They may be aware of other products in the market and, while there are in Five many features that are not present in other products, what amazes them is the workflow.

Yes, the workflow.

Maybe at the first instance they’ll be disappointed that Five is not behaving exactly like the Photoshop version or NLE video editor that they are used to, but once a few key concepts are understood, everything is much easier and faster. Above all, the user feels in complete control.

The main idea is that absolutely everything you can do on an image or a video is done using a general object called a filter. A filter can be as simple as a luminance brightness adjustment or the selection of special frames of interest in a video, or the tool to measure an unknown height in an image. Continue reading →

If you have recently seen our contacts, you may have noticed that we list a new Las Vegas, NV, based office.

Amped Five is currently used in many of the main forensic labs in Europe and it’s spreading as well in Asia and the Middle Eastern countries. With growth strong worldwide, we have seen a growing interest in North America. To provide North American customers with the same high standards of service that our current customers enjoy; we really felt that a local presence was necessary.

The result is the establishment of Amped Software North America, which will be responsible for sales, support, and training in the US, Canada and Mexico. The Amped Software North America operation is managed by EJ Ord, an expert manager who’s successfully run hi-tech businesses in the defense and electronics sectors for over twenty years.

Amped Software North America is fully committed to providing technical and commercial support to end users and resellers in the American market. It is helping both the customers to find the perfect hardware/software solution for they processing needs and helping government agencies and law enforcement in finding the grants to acquire our products. Continue reading →